Michael Schoenhals

Michael Schoenhals is a Professor of Chinese in the Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden. A former Berkeley and Harvard post-doc, he is known as the founder of the garbology school of Cultural Revolution research. Among other books, he is the author of Mao's Last Revolution (co-authored with Roderick MacFarquhar) (Harvard University Press, 2006), available in English, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Japanese. He recently concluded a decade of work on book called Spying for the People: Mao's Secret Agents, 1949–1967 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), described by the CIA’s Hayden Peake in Studies in Intelligence as “an extraordinarily fine work of historical scholarship on a topic about which little had been known.” He is an advisor to the PRC History Group, a trans-national network of scholars managing H-PRC, an H-Net channel that hosts scholarly discussions in addition to distributing news and announcements of interest to People's Republic of China historians.

When news this morning reached us that Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo had died, we invited all past contributors to the ChinaFile Conversation to reflect on his life and on his death. Liu died, still in state-custody, eight years into his 11-...

It has long been standard operating procedure for China’s leaders to pay tribute to Mao. Even as the People’s Republic he wrought has embraced capitalist behavior with ever more heated ardor, the party he founded has remained firmly in power and his...